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Indian Freedom Struggle (1707–1947 A.D.)

Notes

What do you mean by Red Shirts?

But it was non-violent heroism that stole the show as the salt Satyagraha assumed yet another,
even more potent form. On May 21, with Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman to become
President of the Congress, and Imam Saheb, Gandhiji’s comrade of the South African struggle, at
the helm, and Gandhiji’s son, Manilal, in front ranks, a band of 2000 marched towards the police
cordon that had sealed off the Dharasana salt works. As they came close, the police rushed
forward with their steel-tipped lathis and set upon the non-resisting Satyagrahis till they fell down.
The injured would be carried away by their comrades on make-shift stretchers and another column
would take their place, be beaten to pulp, and carried away. Column after column advanced in
this way; after a while, instead of walking up to the cordon the men would sit down and wait for
the police blows. Not an arm was raised in defence, and by 11 a.m., when the temperature in the
shade was 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the toll was already 320 injured and two dead. Webb Miller,
the American journalist, whose account of the Dharasana Satyagraha was to carry the flavour of
Indian nationalism to many distant lands, and whose description of the resolute heroism of the
Satyagrahis demonstrated effectively that non-violent resistance was no meek affair, summed up
his impressions in these words: ‘In eighteen years of my reporting in twenty countries, during
which I have witnessed innumerable civil disturbances, riots, street fights and rebellions, I have
never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at Dharasana.’
This new form of salt Satyagraha was eagerly adopted by the people, who soon made it a mass
affair. At Wadala, a suburb of Bombay, the raids on the salt works culminated on 1 June in mass
action by a crowd of 15,000 who repeatedly broke the police cordon and triumphantly carried
away salt in the face of charges by the mounted police. In Karnataka, 10,000 invaded the Sanikatta
salt works and faced lathis and bullets. In Madras, the defiance of salt laws led to repeated clashes
with the police and to a protest meeting on 23 April on the beach which was dispersed by lathi
charges and firing, leaving three dead. This incident completely divided the city on racial lines,
even the most moderate of Indians condemning the incident, and rallying behind the nationalists.
In Andhra bands of village women walked miles to carry away a handful of salt, and in Bengal,
the old Gandhian ashrams, regenerated by the flood of volunteers from the towns, continued to
sustain a powerful salt Satyagraha in Midnapore and other coastal pockets. The districts of Balasore,
Puri and Cuttack in Orissa remained active centres of illegal salt manufacture.
But salt Satyagraha was only the catalyst, and the beginning, for a rich variety of forms of defiance
that it brought in its wake. Before his arrest, Gandhiji had already called for a vigorous boycott of
foreign cloth and liquor shops, and had especially asked the women to play a leading role in this
movement. ‘To call woman the weaker sex is a libel: it is man’s injustice to woman,’ he had said;
and the women of India certainly demonstrated in 1930 that they were second to none in strength
and tenacity of purpose. Women who had never stepped unescorted out of their homes, women
who had stayed in purdah, young mothers and widows and unmarried girls, became a familiar
sight as they stood from morning to night outside liquor shops and opium dens and stores selling
foreign cloth, quietly but firmly persuading the customers and shopkeepers to change their ways.
Along with the women, students and youth played the most prominent part in the boycott of
foreign cloth and liquor. In Bombay, for example, regular Congress sentries were posted in business
districts to ensure that merchants and dealers did not flout the foreign cloth boycott. Traders’
associations and commercial bodies were themselves quite active in implementing the boycott, as
were the many millowners who refused to use foreign yarn and pledged not to manufacture
coarse cloth that competed with khadi. The recalcitrant among them were brought in line by fines
levied by their own associations, by social boycott, by Congress black-listing, and by picketing.
The liquor boycott brought Government revenues from excise duties crashing down; it also soon
assumed a new popular form, that of cutting off the heads of toddy trees. The success of the liquor

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